Ask An Atheist (and he shall answer)

When I get around to it, anyway. And after I’ve done enough housework and drunk all the tea that needs drinking. So, these questions you asked ages ago before I got lazy – or busy, let’s go with busy – again:

Internally, I self identify as agnostic, although socially, I tend to self identify as atheist in those settings in which I think someone would be more pissed off by atheism than by agnosticism. Are you of the view that agnostics are simply atheists in denial, or do you see us as a distinct flavor of unbelief?

I like your style in going for whatever will agitate people more. Outside of the capacity to be annoying, though, I think a lot of the debate over whether someone is “really” an atheist or an agnostic is pretty fruitless.

It’s not that there can’t be meaningfully different positions, or that there’s nothing worth debating and disagreeing on here. But when your language is starting to obscure the subjects it should be elucidating, or when your discussion is getting sidetracked into an argument about what words mean, or what they should mean, or what you mean by them never mind what anyone else means by them, then it may be time to change tack.

Let’s taboo the words “atheist”, “agnostic”, and any obvious derivatives for a couple of paragraphs. Now I can’t fixate on my own interpretation of those words and assume everyone else is just using them wrong. So, what do I actually believe?

Well, I believe it’s very unlikely that any god actually exists. It’s possible that some such being, by some reasonable standard of “god”, is actually real and part of the world, just like it’s possible that an elephant wandered into the garden a minute ago and is about to trample over our guinea pigs. I can’t offer an absolutely cast-iron guarantee that’s not the case, but for all practical purposes I can get so close that it’s not a situation I spare even a moment seriously considering.

Any particular named deity – Yahweh, Zeus, all the rest – I give about the same probability of being non-fictional as I do to Spiderman, to within a negligible degree. Does that make me a “strong atheist”? Could my position be summed up by positively asserting “I believe that God does not exist”? I think so.

You might argue that, unless I think God’s non-existence can be proven to 100% certainty, then that remaining shred of doubt makes me an agnostic, not an atheist – but if that’s the way you’re using words, I’d be amazed if the word “atheist” is ever remotely useful to you. It seems linguistically unhelpful to set the bar that high.

If I’m actually engaging in a discussion with someone, and they care to hear an explanation of my views longer than a single word, then I’ll explain something like the above, without simply relying on the tabooed words. They can decide whether they think I’m an atheist, or an agnostic, or something else – it doesn’t really matter how they use language, or what ideas they associate with those words, so long as they understand what I actually think.

But if I’m just looking for a succinct, approximate label – something to identify myself with as a shorthand, which doesn’t need to be nuanced or precise – then “atheist” is probably my best shot at giving the largest number of people the most accurate impression of what’s going on in my head. Many of them will still be way off, but that’ll always be the case in a conversation about something complicated where you rely on individual words with no single uncontroversial definition to carry a large amount of information.

Does that help? I sort of forgot the question for the last couple of hundred words and just kept typing.

5 Responses

Your ideology related to God points toward agnosticism and calling it atheism will only confuse those who want to know about it. At the risk of being pedantic, I would like to point out that atheists by definition are those people who refuse to believe in God and will continue to do so, even if proven otherwise. Most people nowadays are empericists as they believe what can be proven by the scientific method and will believe in God if science proves his/her existence. That, by definition is agnosticim. The difference is important because atheists are generally lending themselves to a close minded outlook of the universe when we know so little about it.

I’ve been quite engaged with various diverse corners of the atheist community for several years now. I’ve heard a lot of people who identify as atheists describe how they think and what’s important to them. I’ve seen a lot of dictionary definitions thrown about in that time too. And I’ve never heard anyone ascribe to the definition you mention. Overwhelmingly the view among atheists I’ve come across is that, if they *were* any evidence for a god’s existence, they’d change their mind. The definition of an atheist as someone who wouldn’t accept proof even if they saw it seems to be entirely detached from how people and atheists actually talk about this stuff. I’ve no idea where it came from, but it seems to be another definition that pretty much renders the word useless in the real world if you’re going to insist on sticking to it.

“I would like to point out that atheists by definition are those people who refuse to believe in God and will continue to do so, even if proven otherwise.”

I would like to point out that is the most asinine statement I’ve read today. If you really want to insist that we can only use words in their originally intended meaning then an atheist would be a person who may believe in some god(s) but they just don’t believe in your/society’s god(s).

Atheism is a natural by-product of empirical thinking. I have no doubt there are pig-headed, dogmatic, non-empirical thinking people who claim to know there is not or can be no god(s), some of them may even call themselves atheists, but I’ve never met one.

Great post, but wouldn’t you say that it is possible to be an agnostic atheist? The two aren’t at odds with each other. I mean, agnosticism is the position whereby you do not KNOW if a deity exists. Atheism is the position whereby you do not BELIEVE that a deity does exist. Belief is not necessarily dependant on knowledge.